AMD’s Sub-$100 Line-up: Radeon HD 6450, 6570 & 6670 Review

Rounding out its Radeon HD 6000 series, AMD this month launched three sub-$100 graphics cards; the $55 HD 6450; the $79 HD 6570 and the $99 HD 6670. Despite being low-end options, all three support Eyefinity and are of course, extremely power efficient. Let’s see if they also have the gaming performance to boot.

Metro 2033

One of the more popular Internet memes for the past couple of years has been, “Can it run Crysis?”, but as soon as Metro 2033 launched, that’s a meme that should have died. Metro 2033 is without question one of the beefiest games on the market, and though it supports DirectX 11, it’s almost a feature worth ignoring, because the extent you’ll need to go to in order to see playable framerates isn’t likely going to be worth it.

Manual Run-through: The level we use for testing is part of chapter 4, called “Child”, where we must follow a linear path through multiple corridors until we reach our end point, which takes a total of about 90 seconds. Please note that due to the reason mentioned above, we test this game in DX10 mode, as DX11 simply isn’t that realistic from a performance standpoint.

While it’s a little hard to believe that AMD’s trio of cards here performed better in a hardcore game like Metro 2033 than it did in Just Cause 2, it’s true. In fact, the HD 6670 proved just about playable, although things can be improved:

Graphics Card

Best Playable

Min FPS

Avg. FPS

AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB

1680×1050 – Normal Detail; DX10; 0xAA

31

45.431

AMD Radeon HD 6570 1GB

1680×1050 – Normal Detail; DX10; 0xAA

28

37.901

AMD Radeon HD 6450 512MB

1280×1024 – Low Detail; DX10; 0xAA

18

26.275

Decreasing the resolution to 1280×1024 and detail level to low made the game playable on the HD 6450, with the other cards being able to retain the original resolution, but with the detail level degraded to normal. Overall, still rather impressive performance for each respective price-point.